


Ammonia

by singtome



Series: Polaris [3]
Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: F/F, Fluff and Angst, Mild Gore, Nightmares, general domestic cuteness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-12
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-10-03 03:56:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10235339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singtome/pseuds/singtome
Summary: She sees the woman with no eyes in her dreams that night.(Or: Brenda dyes Teresa's hair blue)





	

 

1.

She sees the woman with no eyes in her dreams that night.

Predominately, Teresa dreams often of women: the ones from her past and her present, ones she has not met and others she wishes she hadn’t. She sees herself surrounded by an ocean of women, and they are all staring at her, their expressions mostly blank. Sometimes they look sad, while other times they look furious. Once they were holding guns, each of them raised and pointed at her, locked onto her forehead. That night Teresa had woken startled and gasping. Afterward she climbed onto the balcony, stealing one of Brenda’s cigarettes until she had calmed down enough to return to bed. She doesn’t smoke; the burning and smell is simply a comfort. She likes to watch it fizzle out into nothing. Sometimes she even allows it to scorch her skin until she remembers that she is human.

She doesn’t always see them – She dreams of trees sometimes. Oceans that stretch for miles, long, white sands that match. Ivy covered walls that stretch for eternity. There are off nights where Teresa does not Dream at all. Just a black, beautiful void. Asleep one minute and not the next, and warm, morning sun shining upon her face coupled with the faint buzz of her alarm. That is probably the biggest comfort of all. It tells her she’s made it through another night.

Last night had been no exception. The woman had been there. She had sat in the centre of a room that resembled a shack, rocking back and forth and humming to herself, a tune which Teresa finds familiar. It sends shivers up her arms, like little tiny spiders crawling about beneath her skin. Her hair is always long and black like the night sky, and trailing down all the way to the unclean floor, where Teresa fights back the urge to scoop it up to stop it from getting dirty.

The woman’s head turns then, turns further than it should, to face Teresa. She has seen this same image a thousand times and yet it is still a struggle to hold back the scream which fights desperately to escape from her throat.

“You,” the woman says, voice high and floaty, “My sweet girl. You will save us. Save me.”

Teresa begins to speak but finds her throat dry. She clears it and tries again, “I don’t think I can. I’m sorry.”

The woman speaks still. Her blood, black and ghoulish, falls down her face and into her lap, staining the white dress she wears, “You will. I know you will, my precious girl. My chosen one.”

“I’m not,” Teresa is shaking her head, “I’m not. I can’t.”

“You will!” And the woman shouts, she always shouts, and Teresa always backs away. She screams the same two words over and over and Teresa covers her face with her hands and struggles to breathe. When she opens them she is small, smaller than she is now or ever remembers being, folded into the arms of a different woman, one with eyes that gape into Teresa’s, frightened and afraid. She calls her Deedee and they hide in a refrigerator until the shouts of the bad people stop, the smell of ammonia burning her eyes.

Then she is still small but standing on her own two feet. She feels the sharp sting of a pin piercing her skin as a man attempts to fasten it to her chest with shaky hands. He has deep, striking eyes, swimming with a type of madness which leaves her feeling empty, and Teresa off hand thinks he looks like Thomas.

And then they’re gone. And Teresa is in her bed, gasping words she does not understand.

 

2.

Teresa has secrets she has never said aloud. The first is the cigarettes. She buys Brenda a new pack every day after work to compensate for the ones she’s wasted, and covers her burnt fingertips with bandages and blames it on cooking. Brenda gives her looks but never says anything. The second is she isn’t always Teresa in her Dreams. She is mostly that, however sometimes she is Deedee, or Danielle, or Tess or Tessa. Sometimes she is the hero and sometimes she is the villain, or sometimes she is nothing at all.

The third are the spiders. She still feels them crawling beneath her skin in the waking world, specifically after a particularly bad Dream. She scratches at her skin, always itchy, always irritated, and wears long sleeves to cover them up when she can. Her nails chip as she gnaws at them with her teeth. She repaints them often, though this doesn’t stop the concerned looks Thomas either doesn’t know he is making or thinks that Teresa cannot see them, when they’re together. He never asks. He gives her her space, as Brenda does. She loves them for it.

The fourth is it sometimes happens to her, almost becoming lost. The fourth-and-a-half is that she does it herself, getting as close to the edge without stepping off of it, just to see how it feels.

 

3.

It happens in front of Thomas one day, and the gig is up. The corners of her vision swirl and fade, starbursts erupt behind her eyes and images that do not belong to her flash before her, like a broken film reel. This time it is not on purpose. She had been asking Thomas about his mother, if he thought of her often, and then it happened and the woman with no eyes had screamed at her, they all were screaming at her.

She wakes to Thomas calling her name and shaking her aggressively, shouting at her to wake up. She thinks she hears him call her _Tessa_ but isn’t completely sure if she imagined it or not.

(A smaller Thomas, with crocked teeth in the process of being realigned with bright yellow braces, who can’t quite pronounce _Teresa_.) 

They fight, or rather Teresa fights him, and they lay in silence for a while. She falls asleep to the sensation of Thomas playing with her hair, and wills herself not to dream.

 

4.

“You’re not touching my hair,” Teresa tells Brenda one day.

Brenda sips her tea and levels Teresa with an innocent grin, kicking her heels against the door of the cabinet she is sat atop of, “Not even a little?”

Teresa turns back to her book, reading but not reading the letters on the page. “No,” she says, “I like my hair, thank you. So no one touches it.” It’s true. She does like her hair. It’s shiny and it’s soft and she likes how it feels, likes how Brenda’s fingers feel when she’s running her hands through it. It is the right length and cut that she prefers, and that’s not changing. No matter to magnitude of Puppy Eyes Brenda shoots at her from across the kitchen.

“Are you sure?” Her heels _bang bang bang_ against the wood. Teresa bites her lip, “I could shave it on the sides. It’ll feel really cool to touch.” To fully accentuate this Brenda points to her own head, where 1/5 of it is buzzed above her left ear. Teresa gazes up at her intuitively.

She’d recently cropped her long brown hair to just below her chin, and while Teresa sadly misses the long, silky locks, she must admit that the short bob is cute and nice to tug, and the shaved portion does feel really nice …

Still, “Nope.”

Brenda groans, “Ugh, fine, no cut. What about dye?”

Teresa sighs and marks her page, slamming the book shut with more force than necessary, “Brenda, please, I really don’t want –”

“Not the whole thing, _Muñeca,_ just a little bit,” Brenda jumps down off the counter and comes to join Teresa at the table. Pushing a lock of Teresa’s hair behind her ear, gently, softly enough not to spook a small animal, she says, “It’ll be a good reminder.”

A reminder. That Teresa exists here and not anywhere else. She can’t fault that logic, she really can’t. And Brenda is looking at her with those damn fucking eyes again and, honestly, is she ever allowed to say no to this girl about anything? Even just once? That would be nice. 

An eternity later but never long enough for Brenda to actually believe that she’s lost this round, as if that would ever happen, Teresa sighs and says, “Fine, princess. But I get to choose the colour.”

Brenda grins broadly, her smile brighter than the mid-morning sun, “Of course.” 

 

5.

Teresa’s hair is blue two hours later. Just a small amount, a lock the width of two fingers, but there had been bleach involved (which, truthfully, nearly made her change her mind and lock herself in the bathroom, the ammonia scaring her the most) but as she looks in the mirror, touching the electric blue strands peeking out under her hairline where it could be neatly tucked away or peek glamorously out from the rest if she so wishes, Teresa smiles.

Brenda is still grinning like she’s won the biggest prize of her lifetime and Teresa, competitive and petty by nature, fights to urge to brush her off. But as her arms settle comfortably around the curve of Teresa’s waist and her grin stretches wide of its own accord, Brenda says, “You love it.”

Teresa cocks her head, watching the blue disappear and reappear among her inky black locks, “It’s alright. You did okay.”

Brenda pokes her in the hip, earning a yelp, and she repeats, “You love it,” lower, into Teresa’s ear.

She does.

 

6.

When Teresa wakes now, panting and frightened, tears leaking from her eyes, she sees blue in her direct line of sight. When Thomas comments on it she feels her hand move to it protectively, and informs him of its purpose. Thomas’ expression grows warm and he tells her it matches her eyes. She catches herself touching it all the time; she plays with it in the car as she listens to Thomas yammer on about whatever he is yammering on about, twirling it and braiding it unconsciously. She chews it at her desk during work – a nastier habit, but she’ll learn. Maybe. Possibly – and when she pulls her hair into a ponytail she is always careful to be sure to isolate it so it is visible.

When her vision swirls and she is seeing stars and women surrounding her, threatening to smother her in their endless ocean of Too Sad or Too Angry or Too Nothing At All, she reaches for the blue, pulls it so that she can see it, and thinks, _None of the others have this. This is mine_. _I am this, this is me. I am blue._

The visions fluctuate and disappear within the minute. She tells Brenda how it’s helped, when they’re lounged lazily in Teresa’s bed, both not motivated to leave the warm confides of the blankets and each other and begin the day. “That’s good,” Brenda smiles, “I’m proud of you.”

Teresa asks her if she ever dreams. They’ve had this conversation before though not properly, Teresa’s skin always beginning to crawl when they get too deep. Brenda says that she did, in the beginning. After the Time Jump, when everyone had begun to wonder about _something more_ , “But no,” she concludes, “I don’t need anything the Others have. They have their lives and I have mine. I’ve got everything I want right here.”

They kiss under the light of the morning, frost casting shadows across the bed as it floats gently from the sky. It’s a nice Wednesday, and gentle one, if there could ever be one, Teresa had been seriously beginning to doubt.

 

7.

The woman with no eyes – not her mother, Teresa tells herself, just a broken woman she does not know or will ever know – appears in her dreams still, for quite some time. Teresa still dreams of women, that part does not change. But now instead of standing frightened and crumbled up like a paper ball against a wall with no hope for escape and no light in sight, just a cold, dark ocean of void and despair, she does not cry. She does not flinch when the woman calls her ‘her chosen one’, because that is not her. She looks the woman in the face and replies, simply, “Maybe. Maybe not. Let them figure it out.”

She stares each woman down until they lower their guns, every last one of them. She wills the spiders to leave her skin and find someone else to bother. She wears that piece of paper pinned to her chest like a badge.

It doesn’t come quick, the freedom, nor does it come easy. It takes time, like most healing does, but when she slips her feet under Brenda’s ankles and pulls her closer to her, holds her to her heart, she feels Brenda thread her fingers through Teresa’s hair, feels her monopolise the blue stands and twirl it around her ring finger, and Teresa thinks, _This is all that I need._

 

_*_

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://singt0me.tumblr.com/) here


End file.
